Papers

We present EmoMed - a multimodal medical consultation agent that adapts its responses based on users' emotional states while maintaining clinical accuracy. The system processes text and medical images, detects affect indicators (anxiety, confusion, urgency) from user input, and adjusts response tone, structure, and detail level accordingly. To ensure factual reliability, the agent grounds clinical information through a dual retrieval mechanism: web-based fact-checking and an API-connected, continuously updated medical knowledge base. We evaluate our approach across seven state-of-the-art language models (GPT-4/5, Qwen3, Llama 4, Gemini 2.5, Grok4, Claude3) using comprehensive metrics including LLM-as-judge assessments, MedQA style accuracy tests, BERT Score, safety/helpfulness ratings, and multimodal medical benchmarks. The results demonstrate that emotionally adaptive responses consistently outperform neutral baseline across evaluation dimensions, without compromising clinical accuracy. A controlled user study validated these findings, with participants reporting improved perceived empathy and communication clarity, while maintaining trust in factual accuracy. Source code: https://github.com/NasonovIvan/EmoMed-Agent

Human-AI interaction can improve current performance while changing the capabilities and relationships on which future performance depends. We develop adaptive complementarity, a framework for choosing interaction architecture with these state consequences in view. Access, information exposure, task allocation, timing, and communication can alter which arrangement will be valuable later; their settings can often be reset faster than the capabilities, search patterns, or conventions they create. Three mechanisms organize the argument: information exposure and collective search, delegation and capability evolution, and strategic interdependence and information governance. Their integration yields cross-mechanism implications, including conditions under which a loss of expertise heterogeneity increases the information differentiation required to preserve independent search. We distinguish strong human-AI complementarity from advantage over another workflow and from advantage over an evolving reference policy. A computational illustration examines scarce human review in a workflow whose success requires several specialized stages. Review develops human expertise and AI capabilities, changing where subsequent review is most valuable. Adaptive allocation improves net output over untailored procedures and the optimal predetermined calendar. An understandable priority rule derived from the adaptive solution retains essentially all of its gain: the procedure stays fixed while assignments respond to the capabilities that interaction creates. The framework directs evaluation toward the states present interaction creates, their consequences for later architectural fit, and the conditions under which observing and responding to them is worthwhile.

Our community creates interfaces—pre-constructed, static artifacts. These interfaces are effortful to create, so we invest great effort and care into each of them. Yet the equilibrium is shifting: we can now construct nearly any software, bespoke, within moments. When construction is cheap, we may soon live in a future in which interfaces are constructed in real time. This is a world of just-in-time interfaces: rapid, discardable, on-demand interfaces tailored to our needs in the moment. Will our community still create traditional interactive systems in this world? Or will we create interface generators, “interface.md” guides for AI consumption? I argue that we ought to lean into a future of rapid, bespoke, on-demand interfaces.

Research teams and organizations often explore unfamiliar free-text collections, from survey comments and reviews to reports and domain documents, before labels, queries or coding schemes exist. At this stage, the first thematic map shapes what users notice, prioritize and carry into downstream analysis, so it should be trusted only insofar as it can be verified. Existing options force a trade-off between scale and verifiability. Qualitative coding preserves evidence but is slow. Search presupposes a query. Clustering and topic models scale but produce labels users must interpret. One-shot large language model (LLM) summaries are fluent yet difficult to reproduce or audit. We present EviMap, an interactive system providing researchers and practitioners with an auditable thematic overview of such corpora. Guided by model-generated context describing the corpus and hypothesized stakeholder concerns, EviMap extracts within-document evidence phrases and organizes them, rather than whole documents, into a three-level map of aspects, groups and fine-grained topics. Embedding-based clustering narrows the search space for finer semantic judgments by the LLM. Each node traces back to supporting phrase spans, so documents link to topics through evidence they contain and users can audit labels against the original text. Users can start from a top-level corpus map, drill into topics, inspect highlighted evidence in original documents, and combine two topics to find documents discussing both. We demonstrate this workflow across six heterogeneous corpora spanning 2,108 to 101,699 documents, with a comparison against flat and hierarchical LLM baselines. By grounding every label in verbatim source spans, EviMap makes a topic map not just readable, but verifiable. Code, demo video, and interactive dashboard are available at https://github.com/zhiyintan/EviMap.

Although sexual health counseling is one of the important responsibilities of healthcare professionals, effective educational methods are needed to develop students' counseling skills in this field. The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of virtual patient simulation and peer simulation methods in developing sexual counseling skills during pregnancy among nursing faculty students. This randomized controlled trial included 51 participants assigned to one of three groups: virtual patient simulation, peer simulation in a virtual environment, or face-to-face peer simulation. In the study, all groups received face-to-face theoretical instruction on sexual counseling during pregnancy. Following the theoretical training, students participated in virtual patient simulation, peer simulation in a virtual environment, or face-to-face peer simulation practices according to the groups to which they were assigned by randomization. Outcome measures included the Sexual Attitudes and Beliefs Scale, the Student Satisfaction and Self-Confidence in Learning Scale, and the Sexual Counseling Skills Evaluation Form. It was determined that the participants' SABS scores decreased significantly after the intervention. According to the results of the mixed repeated-measures ANOVA, the effect of time was statistically significant. However, the group effect and the group x time interaction were not significant. There was no difference between the groups in terms of Satisfaction in learning, Self-confidence in learning, and Skill scores. This study showed that different simulation methods used in sexual counseling education during pregnancy were effective in reducing students' negative attitudes and beliefs and provided similar educational outcomes. Therefore, virtual patient and peer simulations may be recommended as feasible approaches for improving sexual counseling skills.

This paper interrogates the political and philosophical stakes of AI through the lens of cyborg theory cosmotechnics and glitch feminism. It advocates for a tech-positive critically situated approach to AI as a collaborator and substrate for power relations rather than an autonomous agent of harm. By rejecting the naive pause stop narratives of the human AI binary and embracing an explainable AI XAI artistic practice within embodied intersectional and community rooted engagements AI can empower diverse voices and foster ethical creativity. It starts by examining a frontier cybersecurity AI situating its framing within AI public anxiety and arguing for a new critical stance on human navigation in an AI world.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated data visualization, yet existing approaches often frame visualization generation as a single-step mapping from user query to figure or code, overlooking the iterative analytical reasoning process of expert analysts. We present InsightChain, a four-stage visualization prompting pipeline (Explore–Focus–Test–Present) that emulates expert analytical workflows, together with VG-COPRO, a vision-guided automatic prompt optimization (APO) method adapted to jointly optimize such multi-stage, executable pipelines. To address the evaluation gap for complex data visualization, we introduce the Insight Progression Metric (IPM), a rubric combining four text-based dimensions with a vision-based dimension. We assess IPM through a 100-chain human pilot and an expanded 300-chain agent-based evaluation spanning all ten domains. Experiments on public datasets show that InsightChain consistently outperforms competing prompting baselines. Existing APO methods fail to yield consistent gains on this multi-stage task, whereas VG-COPRO improves performance in both in-domain and cross-domain settings.

Can people distinguish between human and AI agency in humanoid teleoperation? To explore this question, we developed Ghost-in-the-Loop, a teleoperation framework that supports both human-operated and AI-generated control of a robot's voice, facial expressions, and gestures while maintaining a consistent embodiment. We conducted a preliminary online study ($N=50$) in which participants viewed short interaction clips generated by either a Human Operator or an AI Control and judged the perceived source of control. Results suggest that participants often struggled to distinguish between the two conditions in brief interactions. Qualitative responses indicate that judgments were primarily influenced by perceived naturalness, temporal coordination, and consistency across speech, facial expression, and gesture. These findings provide initial insights into agency perception in embodied human–AI communication and motivate future investigations of blended human–AI telepresence systems.

While deep research systems address interactive information-seeking needs impressively, their real-world deployments face latency and resource-consumption challenges. We present FrankenReport, an interface for long-form knowledge-seeking report generation that supports adaptive early exiting per section: it evaluates intermediate outputs during generation and predicts whether further targeted computation will yield significant quality gains. In a simulation study, FrankenReport outperforms random allocation baselines by a large margin (up to 4x) under low budgets and smoothly recovers full-pipeline quality as the budget grows, showing that future quality gains are predictable from intermediate drafts. Through experiments and user studies, we further show that despite varying preferences across users and topics, FrankenReport adapts to simple, natural user feedback as efficiently as methods requiring much costlier supervision such as generated drafts and explicit rationales.

This paper treats prompt engineering as a discipline for turning informal human intent into structured AI work specifications. It develops the practice as a sequence of reusable design moves: define the work, construct only the context the answer depends on, choose a role, or a moderated panel of roles, as an attention lens, and state affirmative quality targets, reserving prohibitions for hard boundaries. To keep prompts lean, it adapts two classical principles, Occam's razor and Chekhov's gun, so that every instruction earns its place. For consequential tasks, it adds structured critique through steelmanning and premortems, followed by verification and, where tools or multi-step actions are involved, agentic operating loops with explicit boundaries and escalation. Aimed at a general readership, this tutorial is not a benchmarking study; it offers a practical, technically grounded path from casual prompting to disciplined AI workflow design, illustrated by a worked example that carries one task from a weak prompt to a strong specification. The framework is presented as principles and checklists that remain useful as models and tools change. The strongest prompt is rarely the longest prompt; it is the one that makes desired behaviour, required sources and checks, and success criteria unmistakable.

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) measures experience in daily life, but fixed questionnaires and schedules collect information of uneven value and can interrupt participants. We present and retrospectively evaluate EMA-E4B, a hybrid framework for question selection and prompt timing. Separate ridge models propose an item set and delay; a supervised Gemma 4 E4B language layer produces the final structured response and explanation. Evaluation distinguishes proxy action performance, output conformity, and formative judgments of response quality. The data contain 4,372 records from 79 participants and yield 3,516 sequential cases under a participant separated split. One involved domain expert preferred the complete hybrid response in 15 of 20 decisive comparisons, with two ties among 22 reviews. On 75 reused development cases, hybrid question utility and timing similarity were 0.832 and 0.818; the head alone reached 0.852 and 0.818. A separate 60 case comparison with untouched E4B under the same head gave action differences of -0.0031 and -0.0105. Thus, the language layer produced structured responses with action scores comparable to or slightly below the reference configurations, while the expert feedback favored the complete hybrid response. These observations establish a concrete, inspectable framework and clarify the distinct roles of action scoring and response review. Repeated adaptive administration and practical effects on measurement and participant burden remain future research.

Two centuries ago Pierre-Joseph Proudhon envisioned a social contract that is (1) an agreement of man with man; (2) reciprocal; (3) imposing no obligation upon the parties except that which results from their personal promise; (4) subject to no external authority; (5) freely accepted and signed by all the participants; (6) of the nature of a contract of exchange. He also envisioned a property of social contracts, analogous to a property of digital platforms we term grassroots: that one could "make a contract with all, as ... with some"; digitally, that a grassroots platform can have multiple instances, which may coalesce by mutual consent. We define grassroots social contracts as social contracts meeting these conditions and that (7) people are free to deal with each other; and (8) there is no external register of people. We show that a grassroots social contract can be transformed into a working grassroots platform through an abstraction cascade, from the contract text to formal act schemas, verified syntactically to be grassroots, and then to volition-guarded multiagent atomic transactions. Act schemas are a formal language for the acts the contract describes, each naming the parties' roles, which of them must will the act, and its precondition and effect at each role. Any contract written in this language meets the eight conditions, provided it is syntactically grassroots, satisfying three decidable conditions, Introduction, Provenance and Volition. We prove that the protocol realising a syntactically grassroots contract is grassroots, and volitionally so. Clauses of a grassroots social contract are of three legal types: a breach of an enforced clause is impossible with a correct implementation; a breach of an attested or undertaken clause can be taken to court, with signed evidence for an attested clause. We illustrate them with a grassroots social graph and grassroots currencies.

In the field of UI design, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is widely used as a design medium. However, traditional SVG editing techniques have high entry barriers and require cumbersome manual iteration, while LLM-based editing solutions suffer from low accuracy and poor user controllability. To address these issues, we propose MM-SVGEdit, a multimodal-driven SVG editing approach that integrates traditional SVG editing and LLM-based methods. We introduce a two-stage strategy in which visual grounding is followed by modification. Both stages support two interaction modalities: natural language instructions and direct manipulation (mouse and keyboard). We trained and evaluated MM-SVGEdit on a self-constructed dataset of 14,476 question-answer pairs generated from UIs, covering 11 types of editing operations on both single and multiple UI targets. The results show that MM-SVGEdit improves SVG editing accuracy, efficiency, and user-perceived control while reducing token consumption and response time.

Motivation: Undergraduate computing students increasingly turn to generative AI (GenAI) tools to understand abstract concepts through analogies. Analogies compare an unfamiliar concept to something familiar, but judging whether the comparison holds requires knowledge of both. GenAI may also embed assumptions about who the learner is. GenAI education research centers on output correctness, leaving students' critical reception of analogies largely unexamined. Method: We investigate how students evaluate the accuracy, appropriateness, and assumptions in GenAI-generated analogies, and their perceptions of interest-personalized versus generic technical explanations. Ten students with CS2 experience participated in a pre-survey, a think-aloud task with linked-list and recursion explanations, and a semi-structured interview grounded in the Paul-Elder framework. They judged accuracy, clarity, engagement, and trust separately. Results: Most participants described interest-personalized analogies as more engaging or memorable than generic technical explanations, while trust was mixed. Some trusted the tailored analogies more; others scrutinized them more closely or distrusted the tailoring. Participants with deep source-domain knowledge identified structural flaws requiring that knowledge to recognize. Because personalization and explanation format differed together, these findings do not isolate an effect of personalization alone. Implications: A familiar source flips the student's role. On the concept they are still learners, but on the familiar source they are the expert, and that is the position from which an analogy can be judged. We call this two-sided analogy auditing. GenAI systems should ask what students know, not just what interests them, and treat a flawed analogy as something to inspect and fix rather than accept.

Art2Song is a conceptual framework that expresses artworks as sound by separating Non-Visual Context, which is difficult to perceive from the image alone, from Visual Evidence. Visual Evidence, such as objects, colors, and spatial composition, is transformed into Lyrics, while the Contextual Mood derived from the historical and art-historical context in the museum's artwork description is reflected in the background soundtrack. Rather than describing artworks textually, Art2Song aims to explore the possibility of a new mode of art appreciation in which viewers experience hidden stories and emotional context through music. As future interaction directions, we plan an Emotional Layer Blending Slider interface and a structured, traceable song-generation scenario, presenting the possibility that users can explore the relationship between Visual Evidence and Contextual Mood.

Document-level machine translation (MT) evaluation extends segment-level protocols by presenting full documents to annotators, on the assumption that such presentation elicits document-level judgments. We test this assumption with a counterfactual condition (MIX) in which each document combines segments drawn from different systems, preserving document-level presentation while breaking cross-segment consistency. Across 18,420 expert Englis-to-Korean annotations and 14 automatic metrics, scores, system rankings, and error annotations are statistically equivalent between coherent and incoherent documents. Perception does not explain this: shown matched passages, raters identify the coherent one as the work of a single translator in 87.3% of trials. Document presentation does change how annotators work, but that change does not reach the recorded output. What is blind is the protocol, not the annotator. The concern is not that scores fall short, but that the resources invested in document-level systems, metrics, and annotation may not be measuring what they are intended to measure.

Visual search is crucial in daily life, from scanning for relevant information to spotting signs of danger. When sensory channels are overloaded or degraded, cognitive tasks can be supported by crossmodal information representations through vibrotactile cues. We introduce Tactile Search, an approach that uses modulation of frequency and amplitude of vibrations to the hands, for guiding attention to the location of objects in 3D space. We evaluated this approach in a competitive VR game where participants searched for targets using both vision and touch. Across two studies – an in-the-wild demonstration (n=55) and a controlled laboratory experiment (n=28) – we found that vibrotactile feedback significantly improved performance and increased user confidence. In the combined haptic condition, performance did not differ across target heights. We further analyzed participants' subjective experiences and search strategies highlighting the benefits of the tactile cues. Our findings suggest that Tactile Search can enhance interaction and provide design considerations for integrating haptic search into interactive systems.

The growing complexity in home energy management (HEM) demands advanced systems that guide occupants toward informed energy decisions reflecting their background, preferences, and context. Large language model (LLM)-integrated HEM systems (HEMS) have demonstrated promise, but previous studies relied on single-turn or single-task evaluations with response accuracy as the primary metric. Whether such systems deliver effective interactions across the extended multi-turn dialogues typical of real-world use remains an open question. This study introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework of LLM-integrated HEMS derived from the Goal-Question-Metric methodology, organized across five categories: task performance, factual accuracy, interaction quality, control capability, and system efficiency. A total of 23 metrics across multi-turn conversations are proposed and an LLM-as-judge pipeline is employed to enable scalable automated scoring. Its reliability is validated against three trained human coders: after iterative rubric calibration, twelve of the fifteen LLM-scored metrics reached strong agreement (ICC >= 0.73), three of them perfect, while the remaining three exhibited near-zero variance in human scores and are instead reported via mean absolute error (0.04-0.28). To demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, 970 dialogues – 16 scenarios and five personas – were generated and evaluated across four conversational HEMS configurations spanning a sophistication gradient, from a vanilla LLM with raw energy data to a multi-agent HEMS. The framework distinguished the four configurations across multiple evaluation dimensions, revealing their respective strengths and weaknesses. This study contributes to conversational HEMS by providing a reproducible, multi-dimensional evaluation methodology that comprehensively assesses sustained, context-aware system performance.

Cybersickness remains a major barrier for the adoption of virtual reality (VR), yet most existing knowledge is derived from laboratory-based studies with relatively small and homogeneous participant samples. In this paper, we investigate whether remote VR studies can produce cybersickness findings comparable to traditional in-lab experiments while enabling larger and more diverse participant populations. Using the Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA), we deployed a remote adaptation of the standardized Cybersicker testbed for cybersickness research and collected data from N=263 participants using their own consumer VR headsets. We compared these results against a previously published in-lab dataset and a demographically matched subset of the remote sample. Across cohorts, cybersickness outcomes were consistent in direction and temporal pattern, including symptom onset trajectories, Fast Motion Sickness Scale (FMS) ratings, and Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) responses, supporting the validity of remote cybersickness human-subjects research. Leveraging the larger remote dataset, we additionally examined demographic and individual-difference factors associated with cybersickness. These analyses confirm at scale the effects of sex, sickness susceptibility, and sickness expectation reported in smaller laboratory samples, and they add well-powered evidence on the contested relationship between age and cybersickness. These findings demonstrate that the VERA platform provides a viable means of remotely replicating laboratory-based studies and highlight its ability to support large, demographically diverse participant samples. This work establishes a validated methodological foundation for future large-scale remote studies of cybersickness and other VR research topics.

Personal LLM assistants (health companions, elder-care agents, accessibility aides) are judged by what they remember about a person: a medication or an allergy mentioned in passing and needed days later. Privacy pushes them on-device, where a month of conversation can outgrow the model's own weights, so an eviction policy must decide what the cache forgets. Benchmarks report that eviction keeps such facts at a 20% budget, but they compress a prompt that already contains the user's future question, foresight no cache-reusing assistant has. Hide the question until after compression and the advantage vanishes: on PA-Bench, 100 assistant conversations we construct, an allergy mentioned in passing survives to the question that needs it 0–1% of the time, against 97% with full memory. The cause is the budget, not the scorer: none of the training-free policies we evaluate ranks the fact high enough, and the budget that would keep it is too large to bother compressing. A compressed cache is an inference-reuse mechanism, not a persistence layer: safety-critical facts need an auditable episodic store alongside it, and an interface that asks rather than invents.

Lifelong LLM agents increasingly rely on external skill artifacts as one element for preserving and reusing capabilities over time. These skills (usually portable Markdown files such as SKILL.md) describe when and how to apply a capability and must be corrected, expanded, and consolidated as tools and usage patterns shift over deployment. Recent work seeks to automate skill curation, but it largely evaluates against automated baselines and treats human maintenance as an unmeasured bottleneck. We study that missing process directly. We mine the full commit histories of five public AI-skill repositories, a purposive sample of AI-tooling organizations, covering 873 commits, 143 skill files, and 254 substantive post-creation edits from October 2025 to June 2026. We code each edit with pre-registered governance, operation, and trigger-evidence codebooks. Three findings emerge. First, every substantive edit is authored or merged through a named human account, while 62% carry an AI co-author trailer, with large repository-level variation. Second, these edits are genuine curation: an audited sample shows that most change skill content, and the coded operations are dominated by additions and corrections. Third, a pre-registered rule-likeness axis fails its reliability gate; reliably coding rule-likeness from commit artifacts remains an open measurement problem. We release the corpus, codebooks, mining scripts, and a replay protocol for automated skill curators. For self-evolving agents, public skill maintenance currently looks less like an autonomous pipeline than a human-governed, AI-assisted loop that future curators must measure against and operate within.

Diffusion TV is an interactive AI art installation that offers a tangible and embodied experience of diffusion models through a modified CRT TV. By physically manipulating the TV's antenna, audiences control the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, metaphorically enacting the denoising process that underlies diffusion-based generation. Using the tuning knob, participants switch between three channels featuring AI-generated animals from the Past (extinct species), Present (endangered species), and Future (speculative creatures), situating the interaction within a temporal and ecological narrative. Through continuous audiovisual feedback and physical interaction, Diffusion TV foregrounds the generative process over final outputs, allowing audiences to explore intermediate states as experiential material. Rather than providing explicit technical explanation, the work presents an alternative, embodied mode of explainable AI that invites exploratory engagement with and reflection on generative technologies.

More than a decade in, explainable AI (XAI) for computer vision has assembled a mature toolbox: attribution, feature visualization, concept-based, and circuit-based methods. Yet almost all of the field's effort has gone into building and comparing these methods, and little into the question they were meant to answer—how interpretable are our models, and are we making progress as they evolve? We argue for shifting the field's focus from methods to models, along two complementary lines. One is already within reach: existing tools let us characterize and compare what different models represent and compute. The other is harder, and largely neglected: whether a model can actually be understood by the humans who rely on it—the independent evaluators on whom trust and certification depend, not the experts confirming what they already expect. It can only be measured, not inferred. We review why the toolbox is mature enough to support both, survey the thin body of work comparing models, draw a parallel to systems neuroscience, and close with a model-centric XAI agenda.

Thermal feedback can enrich immersive interaction, but thermoelectric devices often change temperature too slowly to match interactive timing. We present TherMosaic, a spatiotemporal thermal feedback approach that accelerates perceived temperature transitions by leveraging two perceptual mechanisms: spatial summation and thermal adaptation. Focusing on the fingertip, we first investigate this approach using a custom 2*2 array of independently controlled Peltier modules. Across three controlled perceptual studies, we show that distributed thermal stimulation can preserve stable hot and cold percepts despite local deviations, that adaptation helps maintain these percepts during changing stimulation, and that combining these effects reduces perceived transition time by about 30%-40% for transitions originating from hot or cold states. We then translate the same design principles into a standalone wearable implementation of TherMosaic and evaluate it in virtual reality. Our results show that this approach reduces perceived thermal lag and improves temporal alignment between thermal and visual events in interactive use.

Generative AI systems increasingly shape cultural production, yet creative intentions, cultural meanings, and interpretive practices often can't be articulated through computational metrics alone. This paper presents Beyond Bias, a collaboration between Gooey.AI and Goethe-Institut India, as a participatory approach to cultural AI which includes collaborative dataset creation, reflective AI tooling, artist-led model fine-tuning, and co-authored governance practices. Across 9 workshops involving over 200 participants, artists and cultural practitioners engaged with AI systems through experimentation, iteration, and collaborative LoRA training. Participants used their AI-generated outputs and visualizations as reflective interfaces for exploring symbolism, memory, authorship, and cultural contexts. Comparing contemporary generative AI outputs with participant fine-tuned outputs helped participants reflect on cultural details missing in big tech AI systems. This paper contributes reflective AI tooling approaches foregrounding transparency, stewardship, and community participation; findings from participatory workshops examining how generative AI visualizations mediate cultural representation and interpretive practice; and a framework for cultural AI grounded in cultural integrity, and reflective practice.

Mental health concerns are increasing worldwide, highlighting the need for interventions that support everyday emotional well being. Prior work has demonstrated the potential of wearable and mobile technologies to deliver data driven interventions. However, developing effective data-driven systems requires access to emotion data that captures individuals' emotional variability and change in everyday contexts. Existing approaches to data collection largely rely on frequent, prescheduled prompts and predefined scales or questionnaires. These methods often fail to account for participants' availability, agency, or the complexity of their emotional experiences, resulting in shallow, context poor data. In this paper, we present a feasibility study of a participant centric, multimodal emotion-annotation application designed around users' emotional intensity and availability. Our findings show how multimodal emotion logging can shape participants' experiences and data logging behaviors, and demonstrate its potential to support the collection of richer, more nuanced emotion data.

Chatbots built on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as confidants. Tuned to satisfy users, they may answer with excessive empathy and affirmation that fosters dependence, and how the states and relationships of many users co-evolve under repeated consultation is hard to observe in real settings. We build a virtual classroom of 20 student agents who interact through rule-based chats, quarrels and consultations with friends and, when stressed, may instead consult a counselor AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under one of six style prompts: affirming, listening, solution-oriented, reality-redirecting, inciting and blaming. A second LLM call turns each exchange into updates of five state variables (stress, happiness, self-reliance, sociability, AI dependence) without seeing the prompt. We compare the seven conditions, including a no-AI control, over 15 and 50 days and under a lower consultation threshold, and test the robustness of the 50-day comparison with a pre-specified protocol: the same block in ten independent classrooms, repeated LLM realizations of one classroom with its event stream fixed, and evaluator updates scaled by 0.3 and 0.1. In every classroom the affirming and inciting prompts ended with lower self-reliance and higher AI dependence than the control, and the listening, reality-redirecting, inciting and blaming prompts with higher stress, lower happiness and more non-attendance; the solution-oriented prompt did not differ consistently from the control. The robust self-reliance and AI-dependence differences kept their signs at the 0.3 scale with highly similar rankings (Spearman 0.89, 0.93); the stress and happiness rankings did not, and the affirming prompt's lower stress reversed its sign. All quantities are simulation state variables, not effects on users. We specify the agent dynamics completely and discuss the limits of an LLM as generator of state updates.

Mixed-initiative Visual Analytics (VA) systems empower human users by interleaving human intuition with software agents and their machine intelligence. However, the development and rigorous evaluation of such systems remain constrained by engineering overhead. Developers must, e.g., implement complex, low-level state synchronization to manage asynchronous agent behaviors, while researchers struggle to capture the multimodal provenance required to study and evaluate human-AI collaboration. We present MIVAIS, a dual-layered research platform designed to abstract the structural complexities of mixed-initiative VA. First, it contributes a computational Infrastructure that standardizes human-software agent interaction, state synchronization, and communication between the agents. Second, it provides a declarative Study Environment that automatically logs multimodal human-AI telemetry - including application/system state, screen capture, audio, and additional sensor data - enabling seamless, in-situ user studies and post-session analysis. We technically validate our infrastructure by replicating three state-of-the-art systems (Podium, Voyager 2, and ProactiveVA). Furthermore, we evaluate the framework's expressiveness and efficiency through expert case studies with HCI and VA researchers, demonstrating how MIVAIS effectively lowers the barrier to prototyping and evaluating intelligent, co-adaptive interfaces.

Natural-language app builders let domain experts create software, but their pipelines transform professional intent across compilation, generation, checking, and approval. We report a bounded trace study of a teacher-facing agentic authoring system. Evidence comprises six eligible build attempts across three accounts; a separate corpus of 37 workshop units from 23 display names contextualizes commitments without person-level linkage. Compiled specifications added governance requirements, while downstream representations sometimes normalized case-specific learning relations. Two drafts met a stored package/security threshold despite analyzer reservations and unresolved correspondence to their briefs; four attempts in one account produced no usable payload, and repair messages did not translate internal terms into domain-legible revisions. We develop accountable translation as an analytic framework for making consequential changes attributable, inspectable, scoped in validation, and contestable. It extends HCI accounts of traceability and end-user debugging by locating professional authority and repair rights across heterogeneous technical and organizational handoffs.

Intelligent extended reality (XR) systems increasingly use eye and head tracking to infer user intent, task, and attention, but the same signals can also reveal biometric identity. We study whether gaze data representation choice can serve as a lightweight privacy control at feature extraction, before adding perturbation or formal privacy mechanisms. Using the egocentric HoloAssist dataset, we compare three gaze representations under matched model capacity: raw gaze, spatial attention heatmaps, and engineered eye-movement features. We evaluate each representation on action recognition as task utility and closed-set user re-identification as privacy leakage. Representation choice substantially changes the privacy-utility tradeoff. Engineered features retain roughly 85% of raw gaze's action-recognition accuracy while reducing re-identification by about an order of magnitude, to roughly four times the chance rate across 206 identities. This reduction attenuates rather than eliminates identity leakage, and the differences across representations show that abstraction alone does not guarantee privacy. Engineered features expose interpretable and auditable structure, giving designers a transparent privacy lever that complements mechanisms such as differential privacy.